No Better World
by karebear
Summary: "The worst part about all of it is that he can't think of a single choice he would have made differently." Cade Skywalker comes to terms with fulfilling his legacy. Legacy comics aftermath.


**Notes:** I was going through my old files and I found this. Character exploration of Cade Skywalker, assuming a post-Legacy comics future when he goes dark. It was originally part of the same storyline as "Because You Hurt" but is most definitely capable of standing alone. I'll be honest, I pretty much dropped out of Star Wars after Legacy ended, so I've no idea whether or not this is remotely capable of being canon-compliant. I just know that it's _very _plausible for what we're shown of Cade's character, through the 50-issue comic series.

* * *

_"Me and mine gotta lay down and die, so you can live in your better world?"  
"I'm not going to live there. There's no place for me there, any more than there is for you.  
I am a monster. What I do is evil. I have no illusions about it, but it must be done."  
_- Malcolm Reynolds and The Operative, Serenity (aka "the Firefly movie")

Cade tries to lose himself in the daily minutiae of running an Empire, but he is spectacularly bad at it: both losing himself and running an Empire. His skill set is specific and runs more in line with destruction than bureaucracy. Not that the any of the countless paper-pushers under his command would let him do the work even if he understood it. His job is to be the figurehead, to stand at the helm of a flagship and look intimidating. No military has ever learned how to operate in a realm where a senior officer actually has the desire to do something useful. All of this conspires to make things worse for him, left to sit and spin his wheels and _think_, turning over and over in his mind all the injuries that heaped one on top of the other to bring him to this place. They hurt in layers, intense most obviously in the mundane physical manifestations, pulsing migraines and, more than anything, a chronic _tiredness_ that never seems to lessen even after those weeks when he locks himself in his private quarters and forces himself to sleep through chemical means, confident in Gunner's ability to keep the wheels turning with or without his presence. In his worst moments he understands exactly how simple it would be to not wake up at all.

But the ghosts in his head won't let him off the hook that easily. They never have before, so why would they now?

And even if he was able to shut down the ever-shifting tangles of his own conscience, there is his sister. Gunner never leaves him alone, but stays to nag, to fight him, to literally force her way through his physical and emotional shields when he is buried so far underneath them that he cannot dig his own way out. Her presence at his side is a consistent tangible reminder of the pains that run too deep to sort or label: the hollow, crushing guilt and screaming voices of all of those who died because of him, mixed and twisted with the sharper, more personal weight of the shattered promises he'd made to the one person who had ever cared enough to accept him with no conditions.

He'd told her that he would never leave her, he remembers everything about the moments when he said it: where they were, how she'd felt in his arms, the way his voice had sounded, and the warmth of her breath on his neck. Now, remembering those things is the easiest and most reliable way for him to summon the energy enough to drag himself out into the public eye; he can light it like a spark, an all-consuming anger. He'd known for years, since the moment when the bright glow of his father's life had snapped out, that he was broken and could not be put back together. He'd told everyone. They called him a liar, but he'd been more honest than any other person he had ever known. He'd never tried to pretend he could offer them anything but an idiot kid dabbling in powers far beyond his understanding. They were the ones who'd said they wanted him.

He tried to run away, but they chased after. He told the truth, said that he was not a Jedi anymore, but they forced him to bear the weight of that label, they sought out the dangerous glow of the Force that slept inside of him. They should have known better, these people who kept calling him to some kind of family legacy: you didn't have to go all that far back through his lineage to find more than one person who'd taken an intimate connection to the raw power of the Force and corrupted it beyond recognition.

They told him that he would be different, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, and it had brought nothing but death and destruction. They pushed and pushed until the walls he'd built, to protect himself and the galaxy around him, had broken; tiny cracks at first, multiplying until they shattered in a spectacular and irrevocable fashion. They had never been very strong or thick to begin with.

But the worst part about all of it is that, in all of those weeks he'd spent locked in his quarters, fighting intense headaches and spirals of guilt, he could not think of a single choice he would have made differently.

Would he have taken back the gift of life that he'd given, freely, knowing that each attempt was another step into the dark that he couldn't undo?

No.

Sazen, Marasiah, Deliah.

None of them deserved to die, and he does not regret sacrificing those pieces of his soul that brought them back.

As for the big choice, the one that had launched him off the precipice... they'd all known that if the Force really did have a destiny in mind for him, it was that one. Somebody had to kill Krayt, and no one else was capable of doing it. Maybe it's true that only by stepping into the darkness could you really destroy it.

But Krayt had kept the galaxy more or less bound together, dragging his "One Sith" behind him through sheer power and dark charisma. Cade had killed Krayt, trusting in what the Jedi had told him, because despite everything that had happened in his life, despite _knowing_ better, some core part of him that had not yet died believed that the Jedi must know how to lead the galaxy back into the light.

Force, he'd really thought he was going to die in the attempt. Taking down a Sith Lord is not the type of thing you walk away from, and he'd pushed his luck in that regard to many times already. Everyone (Correction: everyone but Gunner) who had known him in the beginning, when the cresting, choking pressure of the Dark Side in Krayt's Temple had truly terrified him, is dead now. The rest of them figured it was something you got used to over time, like the atmospheric peculiarities of a specific planet or the way that constantly shifting gravities never bothered pilots anymore after a few weeks. In truth, it isn't like that at all.

The truth is that eliminating Krayt had simply ripped open a maelstrom. The Sith left in his wake had nothing to prevent them from tearing one another apart, and the galaxy along with them. Each one of them pulled at countless billions in tangled webs of open cruelty and obscure manipulation. They engaged in warfare more brutal than any that had existed under Krayt. Anyone with any connection to the Force that had yet survived was brutally slaughtered, or else they disappeared completely into that warren of rabbit holes the Jedi had created for themselves time and time again. But even the most optimistic know that no more than a handful of Force-wielders could have made it into that dubious safety.

Cade supposes he should be grateful that the Sith had mostly succeeded in eliminating one another. It's certainly made his job easier. Uniting a galaxy of civilians steeped in terror and torture and death was surprisingly easy. He simply had to promise them that it would stop, and they pledged undying loyalty. They even gave their children to him, if - _when_ - he asked, and he sent them out to die needlessly on faraway worlds on Imperial boats generations old that would be forgotten by the next day.

And even that was easy compared to the ones that he knew, his _family_. Jariah. Droo. Even the innocent _kids_. Those are the ones that tear into his soul, ripping at him anew every _second_.

But even then, though he analyzes those moments from every angle in his nightmares, he cannot think of any way he could have done anything different.

They call him Sith, to his face. They call him worse things behind his back.

In secret, behind locked doors with Gunner, he admits that he is no more a Sith than he'd been a Jedi. He isn't anything. He's just Cade Skywalker, a fragile man with a name that says he was supposed to be a hero and a savior.

He'd thought killing Krayt would be the hard part. He'd _wished_ killing Krayt had been the hard part. The realization that he (not surprisingly) didn't carry enough luck for that to be true had come almost simultaneously with the realization that he was not, in fact, dead.

He'd blinked his eyes open in a dimly lit room composed of unnaturally sharp angles and overpowered by the unique scent of strong cleaning chemicals and residual blood found only in med centers. Hovering less than a meter to his left was the sound, and the _presence_, of a woman clearing her throat far too conspicuously to be accidental. When his vision focused, belatedly, he was surprised to recognize his mother's ironic smile. He never saw her again after that, and only his ever-sharpening connection to Gunner through the Force convinced him that it hadn't been just another drug-induced hallucination.

What happened next came over weeks, but still it came at him too fast and furiously to break down or analyze, even now, years later. He could not define a sequence of events or even pinpoint any particular emotion or motivation, just an overwhelming sense of guilt and duty.

In was in this, more than any other moment of his life, that he finally thought he might understand some of who his father had been. Kol too had shouldered the burden of the entire galaxy, claimed responsibility for the destruction wrought by Yuuzhan Vong and set out to fix it single-handedly. He'd sacrificed happiness and all chance of normalcy for his family to do so.

He was killed fighting that solitary war when the fledging Sith took advantage of his trusting nature. His death had been the opening salvo in the very same war that Cade, a generation later, had imploded into a faltering cease-fire that stood a single breath away from the galaxy's mutually assured destruction.

Kol claimed for himself the guilt of pushing Cade's mother away, even though Morrigan had as good as told her now-grown son that she would have left no matter what Kol had done. If anything, she admired the man for his sense of duty to something bigger and stronger than himself, and trusted him to raise their son because of it.

For all the good that had done.


End file.
